O. Henry

Strictly Business

I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You've been touched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and the long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your ideas about the mysterious stageland would boil down to something like
this:

Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better than your own (madam) if they weren't padded. Chorus girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and
Pittsburg. All shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew's real name is Boyle O'Kelley. The ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe Weber is funnier than E. H. Sothern; but Henry Miller is getting older than he was.

All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night drink champagne and eat lobsters until noon the next day. After all, the moving pictures have got the whole bunch pounded to a
pulp.

Now, few of us know
the real life of the stage people. If we did, the profession might be more
overcrowded than it is. We look askance at the players with an eye full of
patronizing superiority- and we go home and practise all sorts of elocution and
gestures in front of our looking glasses.

Latterly there has
been much talk of the actor people in a new light. It seems to have been
divulged that instead of being motoring bacchanalias and diamond-hungry loreleis they are businesslike folk, students and ascetics with children and homes and libraries, owning real estate, and conducting their private affairs in as orderly and unsensational a manner as any of us good citizens who are bound to the chariot wheels of the gas, rent, coal, ice, and wardmen.

Whether the old or
the new report of the sock-and-buskiners be the true one is a surmise that has
no place here. I offer you merely this little story of two strollers; and for
proof of its truth I can show you only the dark patch above the cast-iron of the
stage-entrance door of Keetor's old vaudeville theatre made there by the
petulant push of gloved hands too impatient to finger the clumsy thumb-latch-
and where I last saw Cherry whisking through like a swallow into her nest, on
time to the minute, as usual, to dress for her act.

The vaudeville team
of Hart & Cherry was an inspiration. But Hart had been roaming through the
Eastern and Western circuits for four years with a mixed-up act comprising a
monologue, three lightning changes with songs, a couple of imitations of
celebrated imitators, and a buck-and-wing dance that had drawn a glance of
approval from the bass-viol player in more than one house-than which no
performer ever received more satisfactory evidence of good work.

The greatest treat an
actor can have is to witness the pitiful performance with which all other actors
desecrate the stage. In order to give himself this pleasure he will often
forsake the sunniest Broadway corner between Thirty-fourth and Forty-fourth to
attend a matinée offering by his less gifted brothers. Once during the lifetime
of a minstrel joke one comes to scoff and remains to go through with that most
difficult exercise of Thespian muscles-the audible contact of the palm of one
hand against the palm of the other.

One afternoon Bob
Hart presented his solvent, serious, well-known vaudevillian face at the
box-office window of a rival attraction and got his d. h. coupon for an
orchestra seat.

A, B, C, and D glowed
successively on the announcement spaces and passed into oblivion, each plunging
Mr. Hart deeper into gloom. Others of the audience shrieked, squirmed, whistled,
and applauded; but Bob Hart, 'All the Mustard and a Whole Show in Himself,' sat
with his face as long and his hands as far apart as a boy holding a hank of yarn
for his grandmother to wind into a ball.

But when H came on, 'The Mustard' suddenly sat up straight. H was the happy alphabetical
prognosticator of Winona Cherry, in Character Songs and Impersonations. There were scarcely more than two bites to Cherry; but she delivered the merchandise tied with a pink cord and charged to the old man's account. She first showed you a deliciously dewy and ginghamy country girl with a basket of property daisies who informed you ingenuously that there were other things to be learned at the old log school-house besides cipherin' and nouns, especially 'When the Teacher Kept Me in.' Vanishing, with a quick flirt of gingham apron-strings, she reappeared in considerably less than a 'trice' as a fluffy 'Parisienne'-so near
does Art bring the old red mill to the Moulin Rouge. And then-

But you know the
rest. And so did Bob Hart; but he saw somebody else. he thought he saw that
Cherry was the only professional on the short order stage that he had seen who seemed exactly to fit the part of 'Helen Grimes' in the sketch he had written and kept tucked away in the tray of his trunk. Of course Bob Hart, as well as every other normal actor, grocer, newspaper man, professor, curb broker, and farmer, has a play tucked away somewhere. They tuck 'em in trays of trunks, trunks of trees, desks, haymows, pigeonholes, inside pockets, safe-deposit vaults, handboxes, and coal cellars, waiting for Mr. Frohman to call. They belong among the fifty-seven different kinds.

But Bob Hart's sketch
was not destined to end in a pickle jar. He called it 'Mice Will Play.' He had
kept it quiet and hidden away ever since he wrote it, waiting to find a partner
who fitted his conception of 'Helen Grimes.' And here was 'Helen' herself, with
all the innocent abandon, the youth, the sprightliness, and the flawless stage
art that his critical taste demanded.

After the act was
over Hart found the manager in the box office, and got Cherry's address. At five
the next afternoon he called at the musty old house in the West Forties and sent
up his professional card.

By daylight, in a
secular shirtwaist and plain voile skirt, with her hair curbed and her Sister
of Charity eyes, Winona Cherry might have been playing the part of Prudence
Wise, the deacon's daughter, in the great (unwritten) New England drama not yet
entitled anything.

'I know your act, Mr.
Hart,' she said after she had looked over his card carefully. 'What did you wish
to see me about?'

'I saw you work last
night,' said Hart. 'I've written a sketch that I've been saving up. It's for
two; and I think you can do the other part. I thought I'd see you about it.'

'Come in the parlor,'
said Miss Cherry. 'I've been wishing for something of the sort. I think I'd like
to act instead of doing turns.'

Bob Hart drew his
cherished 'Mice Will Play' from his pocket, and read it to her.

'Read it again,
please,' said Miss Cherry.

And then she pointed
out to him clearly how it could be improved by introducing a messenger instead
of a telephone call, and cutting the dialogue just before the climax while they
were struggling with the pistol, and by completely changing the lines and
business of Helen Grimes at the point where her jealousy overcomes her. Hart
yielded to all her strictures without argument. She had at once put her finger
on the sketch's weaker points. That was her woman's intuition that he had
lacked. At the end of their talk Hart was willing to stake the judgment,
experience, and savings of his four years of vaudeville that 'Mice Will Play'
would blossom into a perennial flower in the garden of the circuits. Miss Cherry
was slower to decide. After many puckerings of her smooth young brow and
tappings on her small, white teeth with the end of a lead pencil she gave out
her dictum.

'Mr. Hart,' said she,
'I believe your sketch is going to win out. That Grimes part fits me like a
shrinkable flannel after its first trip to a handless hand laundry. I can make
it stand out like the colonel of the Forty-fourth Regiment at a Little Mothers'
Bazaar. And I've seen you work. I know what you can do with the other part. But
business is business. How much do you get a week for the stunt you do now?'

'Two hundred,'
answered Hart.

'I get one hundred
for mine,' said Cherry. 'That's about the natural discount for a woman. But I
live on it and put a few simoleons every week under the loose brick in the old
kitchen hearth. The stage is all right. I love it; but there's something else I
love better-that's a little country home, some day, with Plymouth Rock chickens
and six ducks wandering around the yard.

'Now, let me tell
you, Mr. Hart, I am strictly business. If you want me to play the opposite part
in your sketch, I'll do it. And I believe we can make it go. And there's
something else I want to say: There's no nonsense in my make-up; I'm on the level, and I'm on the stage for what it pays me, just as other girls work in
stores and offices. I'm going to save my money to keep me when I'm past doing my
stunts. No Old Ladies' Home or Retreat for Imprudent Actresses for me.

'If you want to make
this a business partnership, Mr. Hart, with all nonsense cut out of it, I'm in
on it. I know something about vaudeville teams in general; but this would have
to be one in particular. I want you to know that I'm on the stage for what I can
cart away from it every pay-day in a little manila envelope with nicotine stains
on it, where the cashier has licked the flap. It's kind of a hobby of mine to
want to cravenette myself for plenty of rainy days in the future. I want you to
know just how I am. I don't know what an all-night restaurant looks like; I
drink only weak tea; I never spoke to a man at a stage entrance in my life, and
I've got money in five savings banks.'

'Miss Cherry,' said
Bob Hart in his smooth, serious tones, 'you're in on your own terms. I've got
'strictly business' pasted in my hat and stenciled on my make-up box. When I
dream of nights I always see a five-room bungalow on the north shore of Long
Island, with a Jap cooking clam broth and duckling in the kitchen, and me with
the title deeds to the place in my pongee coat pocket, swinging in a hammock on
the side porch, reading Stanleys 'Explorations into Africa.' And nobody else
around. You never was interested in Africa, was you, Miss Cherry?'

'Not any,' said
Cherry. 'What I'm going to do with my money is to bank it. You can get four per
cent. on deposits. Even at the salary I've been earning, I've figured out that
in ten years I'd have an income of about $50 a month just from the interest
alone. Well, I might invest some of the principal in a little business-say,
trimming hats or a beauty parlor, and make more.'

'Well,' said Hart,
'You've got the proper idea all right, all right, anyhow. There are mighty few
actors that amount to anything at all who couldn't fix themselves for the wet
days to come if they'd save their money instead of blowing it. I'm glad you've
got the correct business idea of it, Miss Cherry. I think the same way; and I
believe this sketch will more than double what both of us earn now when we get
it shaped up.'

The subsequent
history of 'Mice Will Play' is the history of all successful writings for the
stage. Hart & Cherry cut it, pieced it, remodeled it, performed surgical
operations on the dialogue and business, changed the lines, restored 'em, added
more, cut 'em out, renamed it, gave it back the old name, rewrote it,
substituted a dagger for the pistol, restored the pistol-put the sketch through
all the known processes of condensation and improvement.

They rehearsed it by
the old-fashioned boardinghouse clock in the rarely used parlor until its
warning click at five minutes to the hour would occur every time exactly half a
second before the click of the unloaded revolver that Helen Grimes used in
rehearsing the thrilling climax of the sketch.

Yes, that was a
thriller and a piece of excellent work. In the act a real 32-caliber revolver
was used loaded with a real cartridge. Helen Grimes, who is a Western girl of
decidedly Buffalo Billish skill and daring, is tempestuously in love with Frank
Desmond, the private secretary and confidential prospective son-in-law of her
father, 'Arapahoe' Grimes, quarter-million-dollar cattle king, owning a ranch
that, judging by the scenery, is in either the Bad Lands or Amagensett, L. I.
Desmond (in private life Mr. Bob Hart) wears puttees and Meadow Brook Hunt
riding trousers, and gives his address as New York, leaving you to wonder why he
comes to the Bad Lands or Amagansett (as the case may be) and at the same time
to conjecture mildly why a cattleman should want puttees about his ranch with a
secretary in 'em.

Well, anyhow, you
know as well as I do that we all like that kind of play, whether we admit it or
not-something along in between 'Bluebeard, Jr.,' and 'Cymbeline' played in the
Russian.

There were only two
parts and a half in 'Mice Will Play.' Hart and Cherry were the two, of course;
and the half was a minor part always played by a stage hand, who merely came in
once in a Tuxedo coat and a panic to announce that the house was surrounded by
Indians, and to turn down the gas fire in the grate by the manager's orders.

There was another
girl in the sketch-a Fifth Avenue society swelless-who was visiting the ranch
and who had sirened Jack Valentine when he was a wealthy club-man on lower Third
Avenue before he lost his money. This girl appeared on the stage only in the
photographic state-Jack had her Sarony stuck up on the mantel of the Amagan-of
the Bad Lands droring room. Helen was jealous, of course.

And now for the
thriller. Old 'Arapahoe' Grimes dies of angina pectoris one night-so Helen
informs us in a stage-ferryboat whisper over the footlights-while only his
secretary was present. And that same day he was known to have had $647,000 in
cash in his (ranch) library just received for the sale of a drove of beeves in
the East (that accounts for the price we pay for steak!). The cash disappears at
the same time. Jack Valentine was the only person with the ranchman when he made
his (alleged) croak.

'Gawd knows I love
him; but if he has done this deed-' you sabe, don't you? And then there are
some mean things said about the Fifth Avenue Girl-who doesn't come on the
stage-and can we blame her, with the vaudeville trust holding down prices until
one actually must be buttoned in the back by a call boy, maids cost so much?

But, wait. Here's the
climax. Helen Grimes, chaparralish as she can be, is goaded beyond imprudence.
She convinces herself that Jack Valentine is not only a falsetto, but a
financier. To lose at one fell swoop $647,000 and a lover in riding trousers
with angles in the sides like the variations on the chart of a typhoid-fever
patient is enough to make any perfect lady mad. So, then!

They stand in the
(ranch) library, which is furnished with mounted elk heads (didn't the Elks have
a fish fry in Amagensett once?), and the d'enouement begins. I know of no more
interesting time in the run of a play unless it be when the prologue ends.

Helen thinks Jack has
taken the money. Who else was there to take it? The box-office manager was at
the front on his job; the orchestra hadn't left their seats; and no man could
get past 'Old Jimmy,' the stage door-man, unless he could show a Skye terrier or
an automobile as a guarantee of eligibility.

'But I will be
merciful,' goes on Helen. 'You shall live-that will be your punishment. I will
show you how easily I could have sent you to the death that you deserve. There
is her picture on the mantel. I will send through her more beautiful face the
bullet that should have pierced your craven heart.'

And she does it. And
there's no fake blank cartridges or assistants pulling strings. Helen fires. The
bullet-the actual bullet-goes through the face of the photograph-and then
strikes the hidden spring of the sliding panel in the wall-and lo! the panel
slides, and there is the missing $647,000 in convincing stacks of currency and
bags of gold. It's great. You know how it is. Cherry practised for two months at
a target on the roof of her boarding house. It took good shooting. In the sketch
she had to hit a brass disk only three inches in diameter, covered by wall paper
in the panel; and she had to stand in exactly the same spot every night, and the
photo had to be in exactly the same spot, and she had to shoot steady and true
every time.

Of course old
'Arapahoe' had tucked the funds away there in the secret place; and, of course,
Jack hadn't taken anything except his salary (which really might have come under
the head of 'obtaining money under'; but that is neither here nor there); and,
of course, the New York girl was really engaged to a concrete house contractor
in the Bronx; and, necessarily, Jack and Helen ended in a half-Nelson-and there
you are.

After Hart and Cherry
had gotten 'Mice Will Play' flawless, they had a try-out at a vaudeville house
that accommodates. The sketch was a house wrecker. It was one of those rare
strokes of talent that inundates a theatre from the roof down. The gallery wept;
and the orchestra seats, being dressed for it, swam in tears.

After the show the
booking agents signed blank checks and pressed fountain pens upon Hart and
Cherry. Five hundred dollars a week was what it panned out.

That night at 11:30
Bob Hart took off his hat and bade Cherry good night at her boarding-house door.

'Mr. Hart,' said she
thoughtfully, 'come inside just a few minutes. We've got our chance now to make
good and make money. What we want to do is to cut expenses every cent we can,
and save all we can.'

'Right,' said Bob.
'It's business with me. You've got your scheme for banking yours; and I dream
every night of that bungalow with the Jap cook and nobody around to raise
trouble. Anything to enlarge the net receipts will engage my attention.'

'Come inside just a
few minutes,' repeated Cherry, deeply thoughtful. 'I've got a proposition to
make to you that will reduce our expenses a lot and help you work out your own
future and help me work out mine-and all on business principles.'

'Mice Will Play' had
a tremendously successful run in New York for ten weeks-rather neat for a
vaudeville sketch-and then it started on the circuits. Without following it, it
may be said that it was a solid drawing card for two years without a sign of
abated popularity.

Sam Packard, manager
of one of Keetor's New York houses, said of Hart & Cherry:

'As square and
high-toned a little team as ever came over the circuit. It's a pleasure to read
their names on the booking list. Quiet, hard workers, no Johnny and Mabel
nonsense, on the job to the minute, straight home after their act, and each of 'em
as gentlemanlike as a lady. I don't expect to handle any attractions that give
me less trouble or more respect for the profession.'

And now, after so
much cracking of a nutshell, here is the kernel of the story:

At the end of its
second season 'Mice Will Play' came back to New York for another run at the roof
gardens and summer theatres. There was never any trouble in booking it at the
top- notch price. Bob Hart had his bungalow nearly paid for, and Cherry had so
many savings-deposit bank books that she had begun to buy sectional bookcases on
the instalment plan to hold them.

I tell you these
things to assure you, even if you can't believe it, that many, very many of the
stage people are workers with abiding ambitions-just the same as the man who
wants to be president, or the grocery clerk who wants a home in Flatbush, or a
lady who is anxious to flop out of the Count-pan into the Prince-fire. And I
hope I may be allowed to say, without chipping into the contribution basket,
that they often move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform.

But, listen.

At the first
performance of 'Mice Will Play' in New York at the Westphalia (no hams alluded
to) Theatre, Winona Cherry was nervous. When she fired at the photograph of the
Eastern beauty on the mantel, the bullet, instead of penetrating the photo and
then striking the disk, went into the lower left side of Bob Hart's neck. Not
expecting to get it there, Hart collapsed neatly, while Cherry fainted in a most
artistic manner.

The audience,
surmising that they viewed a comedy instead of a tragedy in which the principals
were married or reconciled, applauded with great enjoyment. The Cool Head, who
always graces such occasions, rang the curtain down, and two platoons of scene
shifters respectively and more or less respectfully removed Hart & Cherry from
the stage. The next turn went on, and all went as merry as an alimony bell.

The stage hands found
a young doctor at the stage entrance who was waiting for a patient with a
decoction of Am. B'ty roses. The doctor examined Hart carefully and laughed
heartily.

'No headlines for
you, Old Sport,' was his diagnosis. 'If it had been two inches to the left it
would have undermined the carotid artery as far as the Red Front Drug Store in
Flatbush and Back Again. As it is, you just get the property man to bind it up
with a flounce torn from any one of the girls' Valenciennes and go home and get
it dressed by the parlor-floor practitioner on your block, and you'll be all
right. Excuse me; I've got a serious case outside to look after.'

After that, Bob Hart
looked up and felt better. And then to where he lay came Vincente, the Tramp
Juggler, great in his line. Vincente, a solemn man from Brattleboro, Vt., named
Sam Griggs at home, sent toys and maple sugar home to two small daughters from
every town he played. Vincente had moved on the same circuits with Hart &
Cherry, and was their peripatetic friend.

'Bob,' said Vincente
in his serious way, 'I'm glad it's no worse. The little lady is wild about you.'

'Who?' asked Hart.

'Cherry,' said the
juggler. 'We didn't know how bad you were hurt; and we kept her away. It's
taking the manager and three girls to hold her.'

'It was an accident,
of course,' said Hart. 'Cherry's all right. She wasn't feeling in good trim or
she couldn't have done it. There's no hard feelings. She's strictly business.
The doctor says I'll be on the job again in three days. Don't let her worry.'

'Man,' said Sam
Griggs severely, puckering his old, smooth, lined face, 'are you a chess
automaton or a human pincushion? Cherry's crying her heart out for you-calling
'Bob, Bob,' every second, with them holding her hands and keeping her from
coming to you.'

'What's the matter
with her?' asked Hart, with wide-open eyes. 'The sketch'll go on again in three
days. I'm not hurt bad, the doctor says. She won't lose out half a week's
salary. I know it was an accident. What's the matter with her?'

'You seem to be
blind, or a sort of a fool,' said Vincente. 'The girl loves you and is almost
mad about your hurt. What's the matter with you? Is she nothing to you? I wish
you could hear her call you.'